Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Scottish (1868-1928)
Ladies' Luncheon Room from Miss Cranston's Ingram Street Tearooms, 1900
Glasgow Museums, Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove

play audio segment

You're looking at a tearoom in Glasgow designed by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, painter and designer Margaret MacDonald. The couple designed this interior in 1900, the same year they were married, and continued to collaborate for almost twenty years.

Often their designs were indistinguishable from one another. In this room, for example, Mackintosh designed the gesso panel called The Wassail on the upper right wall, next to a decorative lead panel designed by MacDonald. On the opposite wall it is the gesso panel that Margaret designed, called The May Queen, next to a lead panel by Charles.

Called the Ladies' Luncheon Room, the dining space was part of a fashionable Glasgow tearoom established by Kate Cranston, the daughter of a prominent tea merchant and the Mackintoshes most generous patron. Originally located on Ingram Street in Glasgow, the room was dismantled in 1971, removed to a warehouse, and restored by the Glasgow Museums from 1992 to 1995.

The room is a brilliant example of Mackintosh's use of elongated lines, highly stylized plant forms, and an ethereal palette. This light, airy space was a complete departure from the dark, stuffy gentlemen's clubs, dining rooms, and pubs of the period. Here women, unaccompanied by men, could enjoy light refreshments in a dining room designed in the latest style.

Mackintosh's stark style was profoundly influenced by the Japanese prints and books on Japanese architecture that he collected. Here the rectilinear geometry of the architecture is echoed in the high back chairs, and a strong contrast is created between the white and silver walls and the dark furniture. Softening this juxtaposition are stained-glass panels in the muted, heathery colors of the nearby hills. The green stained-glass squares along the wall dividing the room from the entrance contain designs based on trees, while the stylized pink medallions between the windows are inspired by roses. Free from what Mackintosh called antiquarian detail, these curvilinear floral designs are far more abstract than the naturalistic decorations of Art Nouveau artists in France and are used only sparingly as accents within the room.

The Scottish architect's elegantly rectilinear designs were much admired by turn-of-the-century artists in Vienna, who invited Mackintosh and MacDonald to exhibit with them in 1900.